“YOU SHOULD come out,” I told Charles as I tugged on the clothes I’d borrowed from Milton. The tight jeans hugged my legs and the artful layers of shirt, sweater, and jacket were nothing I’d ever have chosen, but I had to admit it all kind of worked. “We’re going to see Into the Woods at this high school—which, right, sounds like it’d be terrible because high school play, but Milton says it’ll be good?”
Milton came in without knocking and tossed a pair of pointy-toed shoes on the bed with a flourish, Thomas trailing in behind him.
“Here. You absolutely cannot wear those scrofulous Vans with my outfit.”
I thought about protesting, but the truth was, my shoe situation was actually reaching critical. I’d duct taped the soles back on when they started flapping when I walked, but in the cold the duct tape lost its stickiness and kind of sloughed off, leaving the rubber parts of my shoes gummy so that dirt and hair and dust stuck and crusted in the new layer of duct tape I’d added.
It was pathetic, I knew, but I hadn’t bought new ones yet because I’d kind of hoped Will would be so horrified by them that he’d insist on another shopping expedition. The more fool me, since Will was basically immune to manipulation tactics. So I just put on Milton’s shoes. They scrunched my toes.
“Wow,” said Thomas. “You look really great.”
“Thanks,” I said, considering my reflection. Was this how Will would want me to dress? Put together and a little bit edgy? I ran a hand through my hair but it just looked sloppy.
“Here, can I…?” Thomas gestured at my hair.
“Yeah, sure.”
He and Milton exchanged a look, and Thomas took a small container out of his bag and rubbed a dollop of some product that smelled warm, like a bakery or something, between his hands. He nudged me onto the bed and stood in front of me, touching me tentatively at first and then massaging the stuff into my hair and doing… some kind of arranging. It felt nice, and I leaned into his touch. His hands softened, just touching my scalp.
“Um, o-okay,” Thomas said, stepping away.
My hair was still its usual wavy brown mop, but now it looked like I wore it that way on purpose. It made me look older.
“Hey, thanks!”
“You look great,” Thomas said, ducking his head and looking at the floor where my poor cast-off Vans sat in a puddle of duct tape and melted slush. “I mean, you always look—I didn’t mean, um.”
“Ooh, do you mind taking a picture of me?” I asked him, tossing him my phone. “I wanna prove to Will that I’m not always a total wreck.”
Thomas didn’t say anything as he took the picture.
I texted Will, Outfit approval? Wish you were coming! xoxox
“I’ll, uh, meet you guys out front,” Thomas said, then left.
My phone pinged with a text from Will: Not bad, cowboy. Bet you *could* make me come if you put your mind to it… 😉
Heat flushed through me, and I immediately wondered if I should skip the play and go over to Will’s instead.
Milton thwacked me with the back of his hand.
“What is wrong with you?!”
“What’d I do?” I looked away from my phone and forced the smile off my face.
“Come on, Leo, you cannot be this oblivious. Thomas? Likes you. Obviously.”
“No way. Wait, did he tell you that?”
“He didn’t have to tell me, you idiot, it’s completely obvious. He hangs on every word you say, he stares at you, he invites you to do things.” Milton was looking at me with raised eyebrows. “Did you seriously not know?”
I shook my head. I seriously didn’t. It hadn’t even occurred to me that someone might feel that way about me. I was a radio, and the only station I was tuned to was Will’s.
THE PLAY turned out to be great. I’d dragged Charles with us at the last minute after all, and he, Milton, Thomas, Gretchen, and I sat in the very back row, sipping vodka from one of Milton’s ever-present flasks mixed with hot chocolate we bought at the concession table.
I was warm and tipsy and full of joy, snuggled in my seat between Milton, who kept up a running stream of funny commentary, and Gretchen, who began adding her own commentary after about half of one of Milton’s flasks and enough hot chocolate to send me into a sugar coma. I licked whipped cream off her nose and spent intermission with my head on her shoulder, watching the audience through half-closed eyes.
After the curtain call, we spilled out into the streets with the rest of the audience, everyone talking excitedly, the stress of the parents somewhat dissipated now that the show had finished, people bragging about the lighting effect their son had come up with or the way their daughter had covered for another actor who forgot his lines.
I had one arm linked with Gretchen’s and the other with Milton’s, and the snap of cold air made us half run and half skip the three blocks to the diner. We ate plates of fries and hummus with olives and pita triangles, and we drank coffee doctored with more vodka from another flask that Milton produced from some mysterious inner pocket that hadn’t even disturbed the line of his perfectly cut overcoat, and we talked and laughed in a cloud of fizzy excitement. Charles was explaining the paper he was writing, called “On the Tyranny of Time,” to Gretchen, and Milton was telling us his own theatrical greatest hits and misses.
On our way out, I was so tipsy and high on my friends’ energy that I tripped going down the narrow, slush-slicked staircase that led to the bathrooms, and Thomas caught my arm to keep me from falling. Did he hold on a little longer than was necessary? I wasn’t sure, so I just smiled at him. The smile he gave me back was luminous.
By the time we got back to the dorms, the cold air had sobered me a little, but I was still buzzing, the fluorescent lights in the hallway making my head throb and the texture on the carpet seem hyper-real. Thomas and Gretchen waved good night, and Milton caught my shoulder as I made to follow Charles to our room.
“One sec,” he said, suddenly serious. “About Thomas. Just don’t fuck with him if you don’t mean it, okay?”
“Fuck with him? I don’t fuck with him.”
Milton hesitated. “Just don’t treat him the way Will treats you.”
“What!? I don’t—”
“Babe, you kind of do. I know you probably don’t mean to.”
I shook my head, and Milton patted me on the shoulder.
“Okay. Just… you know how shitty it feels, so be careful with him.”
I nodded, bewildered and nauseated, all the good feelings of the evening rushing out of me like a deflating balloon.
THE STARS rushed past and we zoomed through the planets’ atmospheres, space debris suspended in the thick darkness. I was shaky with awe at the scale of the known universe, even rendered in flickering light and color on the ceiling of the planetarium.
The e-mail from my astronomy professor telling us we had to go to the planetarium for class had come while I was FaceTiming with Will, and I told him it’d be more fun if I could go with him. He’d rolled his eyes at me and muttered about “puppy dog eyes,” but he’d been smiling when he agreed.
Today was the first time I’d seen him since taking my leave of his apartment after our winter break together. We’d talked and texted over the last couple weeks, but I could tell that Will was skittish about the way we’d left things, and I decided to prove to him that I wasn’t some codependent loser by not asking him to hang out every day.
When he’d walked up to where I was waiting in front of the entrance, though, my heart totally leapt. He had come from work, so he was dressed impeccably, and the reminder that he’d left work early to make sure we could catch the last show made me all warm and swoony.
Now, I reached out and twined my fingers through Will’s where his hand rested on his thigh. I did it without thinking, seeking some connection in the face of the sublimity of space. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Will turn to look at me, but I just kept my gaze heavenward and after a minute he squeezed my hand back. My chest was hollow with yearning, my stomach aflutter with affection for Will. For the feel of the hand I held, the leg our hands rested on, the warmth of his shoulder just touching mine.
Love. Not affection. I knew it, really. It had to be love because you didn’t feel affection for a hand. You fucking loved it. Right?
I was light-headed, the word zinging around to the tune of the whooshing keyboard and the zinging strings that accompanied our rush through space, my skin tingling as if it were only molecules magnetized toward Will by the force of his pull. I wanted to close my eyes, to shut out a vastness that dwarfed my love, but I couldn’t because I wanted both.
I wanted all the solidity of Will’s hand on earth, and I wanted to be blasted apart by echoes of it thrumming through space like the afterimage of a supernova.
“MAKES ME feel like we’re in Rebel Without a Cause,” Will was saying as we left the planetarium and walked through Central Park.
“I never saw it.”
Will shook his head at me the way he did whenever I hadn’t read or seen something he considered essential to being a cultured human in the world. I got the sense he’d worked really hard to catch up on all these things when he left Holiday.
“In class the professor told us this amazing story about Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan,” I offered. “Part of the Voyager project was that on board each of the craft were these records where they recorded a bunch of sounds from Earth—like little Earth capsules or something to communicate things about our world and about humanity if they ever made contact with alien life, and Carl Sagan was the one to curate it. Like, jeez, how do you curate the experience of Earth? It’s so wild.”
My shoulder brushed Will’s companionably, but he didn’t put any distance between us.
“Ann Druyan was the creative director of the project, and she and Carl Sagan fell in love while they were working on it. So she had the idea that they should include a record where they measure electrical impulses of the brain and the nervous system then translate that into sound, with the idea that possibly if the record were found those sounds could be translated back into thoughts. Which is such a brilliant idea, just in theory.
“So she let them record the sounds while she meditated, and she says that she was thinking about being in love with Carl Sagan, so that really it’s like the soundtrack to her feelings of love for him. And, okay, I mean, in meditation you’re supposed to not really think, but still. Isn’t that the most romantic thing you’ve ever heard? She sent her love into space to echo throughout the fucking cosmos!”
I hooked my elbow through Will’s and squeezed his arm against me, caught up in the story. If only I could transmit to him the feelings that I knew he wouldn’t want to hear me say out loud.
Will let me take his arm, but he shook his head.
“I guess, but wasn’t Carl Sagan married to someone else, and didn’t they have some super dramatic divorce with kids and stuff because he fell in love with Ann Druyan?”
“Oh my god, why do you always focus on the part that spoils everything?” I groaned.
“The truth of something doesn’t spoil it, kiddo. It’s the truth. I’m not saying they weren’t in love, I’m just saying—”
“No, but come on. I know you think I’m an über-romantic or whatever, but admit it. You, like, fundamentally refuse to believe that something might be romantic.”
He swung around and looked at me, eyes narrowed. “No. Things aren’t romantic or not romantic. It’s not a definitional category. It’s individual. And I think it’s more accurate to say that a lie is what spoils something. I hate lies.”
This I knew. Even the tiny little white lies that most people would consider a part of basic manners weren’t safe from Will’s scorn.
He started to say something more but stopped when a handsome man in his late-twenties jogged up to us, cheeks flushed and the muscles of his chest defined by sweat.
“Will,” the man said, inclining his head.
Will dropped my arm without looking at me, but the man’s eyes tracked the movement.
“Hey, Tariq. How’s it going?”
Tariq’s smile was flirtatious. Filthy. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind it was a smile that broadcast We have had sex.
“It’s going great.” His eyes tracked up and down Will’s body appreciatively. “You never called,” he said flirtatiously.
Will didn’t say anything, and Tariq set his jaw and cut his eyes to me.
“I guess your tastes run a little more to the… barely legal? To each his own. You take care.”
He gave me a dismissive look, then jogged off, his powerful arms pumping at his sides.
“Asshole. Ignore him,” Will muttered before I’d even had time to process what the guy had said.
A part of me had been wondering if an element of Will’s reluctance to really give a relationship with me a try was our age difference, but when I took Tariq’s comment as an excuse to ask him flat-out, Will dismissed it. “I don’t give a shit how old you are,” he said.
Still, though we went to dinner and back to his apartment after, he was as distant and unreachable as a star.
LAYNE WAS holding the portafilter in one hand and a bag of beans in the other, and she looked panicked. Probably because she’d finally responded to my laborious sighs and asked if I wanted to talk about it, clearly assuming—and hoping—that I would say no like any polite person. But I was desperate. So I said yes.
“Oh, okay,” she said, rallying and putting down the beans.
I gave her a thumbnail sketch of what happened over January break, culminating in me asking Will if we could still be together. I told her about what Tariq said and how Will insisted that he didn’t give a shit about my age or about what anyone thought about who he fucked.
How, over the couple of weeks since then, Will had been acting normal, mostly, but how I’d hated it anyway. The idea that Tariq had looked at me and seen not someone that Will cared about, but someone he fucked. The same way I looked at him. Hated that I’d had to encounter him unexpectedly, that he—and god knew how many others going forward—might have to be a part of my life because they’d been a part of Will’s.
Or, worse, that I meant just as little to him as they seemed to.
I’d been sulky. At work, in the dorms, at Will’s. Sulky the way I’d been sulky as a kid when I asked my parents for a dog over and over despite my dad being allergic. Every birthday, every Christmas, I put it on the list, in between every other thing I wanted, the exclamation points after it cascading down the page and rendering all the other things I wanted afterthoughts to the thing I knew I couldn’t have.
But there was nothing to push against, here, no one to hate. Will’s transparency made it impossible to rage at him, and since my frustration was that I wanted more of him, I was hardly going to alleviate it by avoidance.
When I finally stopped talking, Layne shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said sincerely. “That fucking sucks.”
And then she made like she was going to go back to the beans.
“Wait! What should I do? I mean, do you have any advice? I’d love your opinion.”
She sat back down, apparently only comfortable giving advice when directly asked.
Layne blew out a breath. “Well. A couple things. When you asked him if you were together, what did you mean? Because there are a lot of ways to be in someone’s life. Being in a monogamous partnership is only one way, and it’s not the default mode for everyone. So, if that’s the only kind of relationship you’re interested and it’s not the kind that Will wants, then that’s a pretty basic incompatibility. You need to figure out what you want. And why you want it.”
“Why I want it?”
“Well, yeah. Like, if monogamy is what you want, do you want it because it’s the only thing you’ve considered, or because it’s normal so you assume you want it? Do you want it because monogamy is something you actively desire or value? Do you want it because you’re jealous thinking of Will with someone else? Or because you aren’t confident about his feelings for you? Et cetera. You know?”
I nodded, wishing I had a pen and paper to write this all down.
“Even if you figure out what you want, though, that doesn’t mean that the other person will want the same thing. And it sucks when that happens, but you have to radically recognize the truth before you can hope to either change or accept it.”
“What do you mean, radically recognize it?”
“Well, sometimes recognizing the truth requires stripping away what you want to be true, which is hard for a lot of people. You seem, um….”
“What? Just say it.”
“You seem like a romantic, I guess. It’s not a bad thing, necessarily,” she said quickly. “But being a romantic means choosing to see the world as ordered by a central force, or around a central person. And for someone who’s romantic, it’s maybe harder to acknowledge data that doesn’t fit with the fantasy view you have, even if that fantasy’s just hope.”
I’d never thought of hope as a fantasy before. And, jeez, I couldn’t believe Layne, whose only contact with me was at work, had come to the same conclusion about me as Will.
“It’s the same in political movement building, really,” she went on. This, I knew, was Layne’s passion. “There’s the romance of the work that you’re doing. ‘Making the world a better place.’” She made air quotes around the phrase. “But if you’re too focused on the romance of it, you forget that someone has to file the paperwork, and get a port-a-potty, and make hundreds of hours of phone calls. And march in the cold and the rain. And you forget that those things aren’t supplementary—they’re every bit as important and central as making inspiring speeches or seeing that your bill passed in the Senate.
“If you get too caught up in yourself as being a part of that romance you forget that it’s not actually about you. That the point isn’t for you to feel good about the work you do, but to do the work because it’s right and necessary. But that requires you to radically recognize the truth, even when it erases the romance you have or the romance you think you’re a part of. I have to recognize that when I go to a Black Lives Matter protest, I’m a white person taking up space, and my very presence there might do harm. That my intentions don’t matter, at the most basic material level.
“That’s the radical truth: that I might care a whole hell of a lot, but my level of feeling doesn’t affect the fact that other people might experience me and the world differently than me, and that no romantic grand narrative I bring into the space, learned from years and years of absorbing the world through headlines and sound bites, is going to change the fact that some people will look at me and feel just the same as if I were some ignorant NYU freshman who jumped on the protest thinking it was a parade I could Instagram.”
I gaped at her, never having heard her say more than a casually tossed-off comment here or there about anything but coffee or scheduling or mopping the floors.
She opened her mouth to continue, but paused. I didn’t know what my face was doing, but my surprise must’ve been evident. I gestured that she should continue.
“Practically speaking, thinking about your situation, you need to recognize whatshisname’s truth too. Will’s. Like, who is he, really? What can you expect? How much is it reasonable to expect someone to change? Is that expectation generous? It means stripping away the romance from them, from your vision of them. It’s really hard to see people as they are, sometimes. We have a lot invested in seeing them in relation to ourselves.”
“Okay, sorry, but… are you like a licensed therapist or something? A professional philosopher? Sorry, never mind, go on.”
Layne shook her head seriously.
“These are all things that I think a lot about,” she said. “In my community, among my friends and lovers, nonmonogamy is the norm, so we talk about it a lot, and I have a lot of experience with different ways it can play out. I know some of the questions you need to ask, that’s all. And stripping away the narratives—whether of romance or of fear or whatever—that culture has manufactured and perpetuated is at the heart of my political work. You can’t have any hope of working toward social justice until you cultivate the ability to see the realities of what you’re working with.”
JUST AS Charles’ philosophy project had taken over his life, he had taken over our room and turned it into something that looked like that dude’s office in A Beautiful Mind. He restructured his schedule so that each day lasted for thirty-six hours instead of twenty-four. He was still abiding by the whole wake up, eat breakfast, then lunch, then dinner thing. But it was difficult when some of his classes now occurred in the middle of his night. His working with the lights on at all hours of the night—excuse me, of my night—hadn’t been too bad, but in an attempt to make sure he didn’t accidentally sleep at the wrong time, Charles had taken to putting a file cabinet that he found in the basement on top of his bed so that he couldn’t go to sleep without wrestling it off his bed—and into the middle of the room, where I inevitably tripped over it or stubbed my toe on it.
But tonight it was our turn to host movie night—which we should just start calling Felicity night—so we really needed to move the damn filing cabinet.
Gretchen showed up early with snacks, and I related some of what Layne had told me, because it seemed like stuff Gretchen would be interested in.
I had thought about Layne’s words a lot in the last few days. When Will called me a romantic I’d thought of it in contrast to him and his total resistance to romance of all kinds, but to hear it in the context of what Layne said put it in perspective.
She was right that I saw the world as having a kind of meant-to-be. Without many friends or much to see, I started to make a game of seeing things through the lens of the books I read or the movies I watched, imagining drama where there was none, or turning the drama to a different plot.
My parents’ dull relationship seemed depressing as a model—certainly nothing to aspire to. Even my sister, who was pretty and popular, mostly seemed dissatisfied with the boys she went out with.
So when Will showed up, looking so much the part of the hero, interesting and cultured and living in New York City… well, I guess I’d cast him as exactly that.
But everything was different now. Now I knew him. Knew him, I got the sense, in a way that other people really didn’t.
And Layne was right: the truth was that Will didn’t want the kind of relationship I was used to seeing. And that wasn’t bad, it was just true for him.
“Layne’s basically a philosopher,” I told Gretchen, Charles’ head popping up at the word “philosopher,” tuning in for the first time in hours, then immediately turning away again when he realized we were just talking about our actual lives.
“Yeah, she’s pretty great,” Gretchen said.
Since Gretchen had been hanging out at Mug Shots doing work, she and Layne had spent some time together, I knew, and there was something in Gretchen’s voice that sounded strangely….
“Uh, Gretch,” I said carefully. “Are you like… into my boss?”
She shot me a way-to-make-it-all-about-you look. But then she bit her thumbnail and nodded.
“Kinda. I’ve seen her a few times. We hit it off, so.”
“Whoa. I didn’t know you were….” I was going to say I didn’t know she was into girls, which was true, but mostly it was that I’d never thought of Gretchen as being into anyone. She never talked about having crushes on anyone or finding people attractive. She never talked about sex or mentioned people she’d dated in the past. I’d kind of assumed she just wasn’t particularly interested.
Gretchen shrugged. “I don’t know. I just like her.” And that was Gretchen, as straightforward about her feelings as she was about everything else.
I smiled at her and she smiled back, seeming to shed any uncertainty. “We’ll see how things go. She thinks I’m too young, I think.”
“God, what’s up with that?” I said, thinking back to Tariq’s comment in the park.
“I get where she’s coming from, though, I guess,” Gretchen said, calm logic firmly back in place. “It’s not a personal indictment. But we are at different places in our lives. We’ve had different experiences. We know ourselves differently.”
“Ugh, stop being so annoyingly mature and logical. This is feelings stuff! Feelings stuff isn’t logical.”
“‘Annoyingly mature and logical’—can I quote you on that to Layne?”
“I’m sure she already knows. She’s annoyingly logical too. Clearly you’re meant for each other.”
It was a divisive episode, with Milton and Gretchen taking Noel’s side and Thomas and me in the Felicity camp. Charles, as usual, was only partly paying attention to the content of the show. Today he was stuck on the conviction that they hadn’t shot a scene where it was set because the traffic was going in the wrong direction for that street.
“But don’t you admire how she tells him how she really feels? See—” I turned to Gretchen. “—the radical truth, like Layne says.”
“I… don’t think that’s what she means by that,” Gretchen said.
“Well, okay, but this is still about telling the truth.”
“Mmm, I think there’s a big difference between forcing yourself to look at things honestly and blabbing out your personal truth because it makes you feel good,” Gretchen said.
“I don’t know,” Thomas said. “I think it’s brave to just put it all out there like that. I could never do that; I’d be too scared of rejection.”
“But Felicity doesn’t tell the truth because she’s brave,” said Gretchen. “She tells the truth as a compulsion. She tells the truth because she doesn’t want to have to handle her emotions on her own. She makes people complicit in them.”
“Well, I think she doesn’t know what she wants sometimes too,” Milton chimed in, “so she tells the truth hoping that someone will make the decision for her. Take it out of her hands.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe she just wants genuine connections with people. And she doesn’t think you can have that if you don’t tell the truth, even when it’s hard or it makes someone uncomfortable. And she does know what she wants, it’s just different from day to day. Like, she pays attention to how her feelings change. They’re still real, even if they’re not consistent.”
“I like Meghan,” asserted Charles from across the room, perched on the filing cabinet to see the schedule he’d tacked high on the wall.
He was taking a one-credit sports medicine class this semester to fulfill some arcane distribution requirement and was developing systems to integrate movement into his daily schedule, which included putting things around the room in configurations that required him to climb over furniture or jump on top of it to access them.
He’d relocated his underwear to the top of my closet and his socks to under his bed so the two things he’d usually reach for at the same time were as geographically distant as you could get in our room—notably smaller than the dorms in Felicity—and begun plugging his laptop into the farthest outlet from his desk with a system of extension cords that I was certain would one day kill either me or his computer.
“No surprise there,” Milton muttered, looking around. “Your senses of décor are about on par.”
I LET myself into Will’s apartment with the keys I still had from January, sniffing myself to try and determine just how much like milk I smelled. I’d come right from work, figuring Will was just going to pull my clothes off pretty soon after I got there anyway, the way he had the last few times I’d seen him. I had stopped briefly to get a piece of tiramisu, though. Hopefully even if I reeked of coffee shop, the tiramisu would make up for it. It was Will’s favorite, and I knew work stuff had been stressing him out the last few weeks.
He’d been staying late and bringing more work home than usual. He still hadn’t decided what to do about Gus’ offer to go into business for themselves, and he was having a problem with a client whose agent wanted him to produce a cover that would change the face of publishing even though the book she was representing was the third in a pedestrian series.
When I opened the door, I heard a noise from the direction of the bedroom. A low groan. Unmistakably Will. For a moment I held myself suspended in a bubble of fantasy that I was about to walk in on the super hot scene of Will jerking off. He’d be startled to see me at first, but then I’d sit on the edge of the bed and touch him as he pleasured himself. Run my hands over his thighs and between his legs. Suck on his nipples and dip my tongue in his belly button to feel how it changed the way his hand moved on his cock.
Then the bubble burst.
Another groan. This one decidedly not Will.
I should’ve left. I should have taken the tiramisu and backed out the door like I’d never been here at all.
But I didn’t leave. I closed the door behind me carefully and, holding the tiramisu in front of me like a ward, crept toward the bedroom, all the time I’d spent here bent to the purpose of getting there without making a sound so I could see for myself something that Will had insisted upon a hundred times: that he fucked other people.
I pushed the bedroom door open thinking that I knew how I was going to feel because I already felt that way. Gutted. Shredded. Devoured.
But though he had told me a dozen times over the months I’d been here, Will’s words were no inoculation. It was so much worse than I’d thought it would be.
Because I’d only thought about how it would feel to see Will with someone else. I hadn’t thought about how it would be to see another man with Will. Touching him. Kissing him. Doing all the things to him that I did. Making me totally redundant in Will’s life.
The door swung open on a scene so vivid it took me a moment to process the details. Will, on the bed, groaning as a man kissed him, bit his neck, pulled his hair back, hips grinding together, Will in just his underwear, the other man still half dressed. It was both intimate and impersonal, intense physical closeness with purely functional touch.
I must’ve made some horrible, broken sound because Will craned his head around the guy’s shoulder and looked at me. For a moment, I saw something in his eyes that I could read: panic, maybe, or regret. Then his face went blank and shuttered. He struggled underneath the man for a moment before the guy realized he was trying to sit up.
Distantly I heard a wet crunch, and I searched the bed for a detail I’d missed, slowly becoming aware that it was the sound of the tiramisu I’d been holding hitting the ground, its plastic clamshell cracking as it splattered on the floor.
Will shouldered the man to the side and scrambled off the bed, pulling on the same sweatpants that I’d pulled down the other morning when I’d dropped between his knees on the couch and sucked him until he was clutching my hair and cursing at me to let him come, his hands soft afterward, brushing over my cheeks and jaw and settling on my neck as we gazed at each other.
Now when he came over to me, I couldn’t stand to look at him, couldn’t stand the idea that he’d touch me. I wheeled around and made for the front door. He caught up to me before I opened it and I heard the man swear from the bedroom. I hoped he’d cut his foot open on the tiramisu box.
“Leo, wait,” Will said as the man came out of the room, wiping his foot on the rug. He was handsome. Fortyish, with light brown hair and a beard threaded with gray, trim and muscular, and everything I wasn’t. He leaned in the doorway, still shirtless, as if they were going to pick up where they’d left off.
“The kid’s cute. He can join us if you want,” he said, eyes dragging over me. He smiled at me, and I felt a brief flicker of flattery before it was replaced with disgust.
“Can you fuck off now, please,” Will told him, never looking away from me.
The man grumbled and went to the bedroom, coming out a minute later fully dressed as Will and I stared at each other. I was cataloging the places I’d seen the man touch him like I was dusting him for fingerprints, each touch standing out, a black spot on his pale skin.
The man crossed between us, patting Will possessively on the ass as he opened the door.
“I left my number on the bed. In case you want to finish what we started.” Will didn’t even look at him.
“Leo,” Will started, his voice unbearably gentle.
I couldn’t help it. I burst into tears. It was the final mortification.
“I told you,” Will said softly, voice strained. “I told you that I wasn’t what you wanted. That you shouldn’t expect anything from me.”
I shook my head furiously. I knew what he’d said, of course I knew. But so many things he’d done said something so different.
“You like me!” I found myself shouting. “I know you do!”
“I do, Leo. I like you so much. Of course I do.”
I knew that I sounded foolish. Childish. That Will had been clear on this point. And yet I couldn’t help myself. All I could process were the starkest reactions. The most basic hurts.
“Then why? Why would you do this?”
“It has nothing to do with you. I—other people—it’s just sex, it doesn’t matter.”
“If it doesn’t matter then stop!” I demanded. I was a hundred yards out of line, I knew, and my voice sounded frenzied.
Will looked down and shook his head.
“That’s not…. Leo, I don’t want to stop.”
“But how? How can you want them if you care about me at all? I would never do that to you. Maybe you’re just scared to admit that we could actually work!”
Will frowned and took a deep breath. “I’m trying not to lose my temper because I know you’re upset. I never promised you anything. In fact, I stood right here and told you that if we went down this road, it was with the knowledge that if things didn’t go the way you wanted then you were choosing it with your eyes open. And you agreed. You agreed that it was okay and that we’d still be friends. You’ve always known who I was. The fact that you didn’t want to admit it to yourself doesn’t make me the bad guy. It doesn’t mean that I’ve betrayed you or broken a promise. Just because you wanted something to be true doesn’t make it true. You don’t get to decide how things go and make them be that way.”
“No, you always decide! Everything’s always on your terms. You decide exactly how close I can get. What I can ask you about and how much I can know you. When I can stay and when I have to go. I’m always waiting for you, hoping that you’ll—”
“I get to decide those things! Everyone gets to set their own terms. That’s how being a goddamned adult works. It’s my fucking apartment, so of course I get to decide when you can stay and when you have to go. And, Jesus, you already know me better than any—”
He broke off, glaring at me.
“And then you just let yourself in here like it’s a damned clubhouse or something, and you see something you don’t want to see and you call me a fucking whore, like it’s not my right to act exactly as I want to in my own house!”
He spun away, grabbing paper towel and squatting down to clean up the tiramisu splattered in the bedroom doorway.
My heart pounded in my throat and my ears rang. I wanted to punch him, kick him, rip at his hair—somehow mar the beauty that mocked me. Make him hurt the way I was hurting right now.
“I think you’re doing it on purpose!” I choked out.
“Yeah, Leo, sure,” he said tiredly. “I orchestrated bringing some guy back here at exactly the moment you were going to burst in completely unexpected just to prove a point to you that I’ve been making from the beginning.”
“No.” I shook my head, eyes squeezed shut. “I think you hurt so much sometimes—hate the world so much—that you think I’ll never understand, so you’re trying to hurt me so much that I turn into someone who can understand.”
Will rocked on his heels, dropping to the floor as if the force of my words had propelled him backward.
“Jesus Christ, no,” he said, horrorstruck.
I bit my lip, tears streaming down my face.
“I’m done,” I said. “I can’t do this anymore. It hurts too much.” My voice was ragged, choked. I felt blasted out. Hollow.
Will was still on the floor looking up at me, blond hair mussed, bite marks starting to come out as bruises on his neck, one hand raised as if he could touch me though I was steps away.
“But you knew,” he insisted again, clinging to the sentiment the way he clutched the dirty paper towel in his hand. “You knew from the start.”
His eyes were bright and his voice quavered slightly.
I bit my lip and nodded, suddenly so exhausted that for once I had nothing to say to him.
“Yeah, okay. I guess I did.”
The last thing I saw as the door swung shut was a footprint in tiramisu marring the rug the way the man’s bites marred Will’s skin.
